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From creating worlds that are ‘Lynchian’ to coping with rejection letters from editors, British author Sophie Mackintosh shares a few insights on her journey as a writer, and her maiden trip to South Asia and the Kerala Literature Festival
Sophie Mackintosh at the Kerala Literature Festival. Pic Courtesy/KLF
It is a sweltering afternoon on the beach in Kozhikode. Amidst the buzz and humdrum of the media-room, Sophie Mackintosh is still in a tizzy when this writer catches up with her. The 37-year-old British novelist is in town as part of the just-concluded 8th Kerala Literature Festival (KLF), on the back of her latest title, Cursed Bread (Penguin RandomHouse). A work of atmospheric fiction that blends feminism, mass hysteria and historical fiction together, it was long-listed for the Women’s Prize in 2023.
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“I do love good stories about mass hysteria,” Mackintosh, a University of Warwick Writing Programme graduate, admits, when we catch up with her on the sidelines of KLF at the Thoolika venue on Kozhikode Beach. Having worked her way through the publicity industry, the Warwick graduate shares that Cursed Bread actually preceded her first works. “I had read about the tragedy of the events at Saint-Esprit in 1951, and thought someone should write about it. Then, I went off and wrote some stuff. But this kernel remained with me,” she recalls.
The kernel revolves around the story of a baker’s wife, Elodie, whose slow obsession with a new couple in the sleepy village turns to chaos. The story was inspired by the 1951 incident in a small town of Saint-Esprit, near Paris that left 250 people of a village violently ill.
Incidentally, Mackintosh spoke at the festival over multiple sessions about the genre, social constructs and the price of freedom — themes that recur in her work. Referring to her latest heroine, she says, “Elodie is a difficult character to love. She wants to break free from her life, but her drive for freedom pushes her so far out. I like such characters. They are flawed and difficult to explain, but you have to live with them.”
Quite the line to take when people already speak of your works as part of Margaret Atwood and David Lynch’s literary family. “Now, that is a great comparison,” she laughs. As for the warmth of Kerala’s beaches, it might surprise some visitors but the London resident seems to be enjoying it. She reveals, “This is my first trip to South Asia. I flew in last week from Colombo. In Kerala, I just took off to visit the Beypore and Kappad beaches. As someone living in cold London, I just loved the sun,” she admits. Is a visit to Mumbai somewhere in the future, we ask? “Not yet. But I would love to drop by the city. There are so many stories,” she says.
The Kerala trip is a short vacation from her ongoing work on the next title. “It is a romance, actually,” she chuckles. Set in contemporary times, the story will revolve around two women from different eras who find each other across time, Mackintosh says. “You can never have enough romance,” she chuckles, before rushing off to get a cold coffee before her next session.
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